The clue is in the second router name: "pos-0-1-0-0-pe01.seattle.wa.ibone.comcast.net". It's a backbone ("ibone") router. Most likely as part of their aggregation scheme, the San Jose router is allowed to feed into it but the lower-level Seattle routers are not. I actually see something similar in my routing pattern: I live in Ashburn Viriginia, but the packets route out to Charlotte NC and then back to Ashburn ibone routers.

Despite the ranges specified in the survey, I'm getting 87ms ping in North America. I'm thinking this one is on Telus, though... or savvis, who I don't much trust anyway. Why the heck are they routing my packets to/.?

I'm connected through my $DAYJOB VPN, so traceroute takes about 30ms to get out the door and over to ***.sfo.savvis.net. Traceroutes and pings from/. itself are running 80ms or so. Neither traceroute nor ping are necessarily accurate, because systems, especially routers, don't always prioritize them, and routers especially tend to use the underpowered CPU to respond to pings, but simple routed packets get handled by ASICs or at least line cards, so ping/traceroute times should be interpreted as an upper

My ping time with Time Warner is great,its my speed that sucks. Have to keep calling them up saying "I am paying for the 20 meg service, not the 1.5 meg service", and they will be like "sorry, let us reset something on our end". The whole issue could probably be resolved if they just added an additional node to my neighborhood. I shouldn't be getting buffering issues on a 3.5 Mbps Hulu stream when I have nothing else going on in my network.

It says you got through, which isn't always guaranteed on TW. After a few months on TW, I switched to using Google's DNS, since the only thing worse than 80+ ms is "timed out". And that was happening way too frequently.

Funny thing, though: Chrome always found the URLs it was looking for. Made me wonder if it was just using its own DNS anyway. Not curious enough to investigate further, though.

I'm also in Toronto (in Scarborough, out by the zoo) and I'm getting 27ms ping times. That puts me squarely in the 20-40 range. However, I am not in the US (nor a citizen thereof), so do I answer 20-40 based on my ping time, or do I answer 40-80 based on my geographic location?

I guess I'll have to choose the "= 40ms to 80ms (same continent)" option, because I am technically less than 80ms and the poll option syntactically doesn't specify a range.

My average ping time is just over 93ms and I live in Southern California and use ADSL. Traceroute takes 13 hops to get there, going through Chicago and Elk Grove. (In that order.) I'm not sure just what that means,

Some web sites work reasonably fast, some terribly slowly, others not at all. In particular, local city newspaper web sites appear to be blocked by the Great Firewall, while national news sites appear to work.

Although
High latency = slowand
Dialup = slowI wouldn't have thought of "dialup" to describe a high-latency connection. (Gee, by eliminating your local router, it drops a hop, and should be faster, right?)

Years ago, the latency from my DSL provider to some locations was so bad (>500ms ping times) that I actually dialed another ISP on when I was using an especially "chatty" protocol, and enjoyed better overall performance, even though the max theoretical throughput was only 1/20th what the DSL connection offered..

The problem is that Modems have so damn many buffers in them (Compression, UART, Error Correction, Serial Driver) that they typically see high ping times just because the packet spend so much time waiting around for other packets instead of getting clocked out on the phone line. A long time ago I had a precursor technology to "Winmodems", a modem that had most of the hardware except for the error correction and compression parts. Those were handled by a separate (Windows 3.1) driver. After installing FreeBSD and Windows 95 on my box, I lost access to that driver, but discovered that the modem actually performed better for online games (Doom 2, C&C, Warcraft) than it did before. It wasn't able to recover from someone picking up the phone in the middle of a call, but generally the connection was stable. I undoubtedly had good phone lines though.

No it isn't. It's normal latency from this part of the world. Here in Australia, which is a bit further away again, I get average ping time of 310ms. There's a lot of fibre and numerous repeaters along the way. That all drives up propagation time.

My 'net connection is quite variable. Sometimes it's good, and I get around 200ms to hit google.com, but sometimes it is so slow, and it takes ~1 second to hit google.com. At the moment, here's the results of my latest ping to/. (taken just moments ago).

Weird I got an average 304ms, on a responsibly fast ADSL 2+ connection near Sydney Australia (median and mode both where closer to 270ms, but still very high). Is my connection really that slow, it certainly doesn't seem like it.

The average of 5 pings is 93 msec, which you characterize as "a pond divides us". But your IP address is hosted in Iowa while I am in California, only half a continent away. I can download from Hayes, Iowa, at 15 Mbps.

We live in a rural area outside Tacoma, WA (98580 if you really care) no cable or DSL service available. With a LG VL600 USB modem plugged into a Cradlepoint MBR95 router: High of 108ms, Low 91ms. Until about 2 months ago we were connected on 3G, most ping times were 150-250ms, thankfully Verizon upgraded our area to LTE and speed also went up about 10X from around 180k max downloads to 2MB / second max.
We use to use directway satellite internet, that never got ping under 800ms, average was usually from

But I'm in rural America. I'm lucky I can even ping anything, despite paying $70 a month for 0.5Mbps. (Yes, the decimal point and units are correct. We pay for 0.5, but get 0.35. Almost fast enough to stream music!)

I'm in Australia and my average is 237ms, and they say that we don't need the NBN...I'm sure that is a provider problem, as well as a shitty infrastructure problem. Once a year my Internet/phone line drops out for a day or two and then I have to call out a tech to look at the exchange, and each time they find a problem with it...

NBN is (mostly) about having more bandwidth. Unfortunately the NBN cannot overcome the speed of light in a fibre. According to Wolfram Alpha, Sydney to LA is 12048km. This takes approx 56 ms (assuming amplifiers add no delay), one way. So absolute fastest would be 110 ms.
However there are many more steps along the way.

Actually I'm not sure if "hops" gives the complete picture anyway. I've heard that these days there's a lot of networking equipment that doesn't show up as a hop at all in the chain. If someone knows more about networking I would like to hear a comment.

That looks to me like it's the savvis Dallas to Chicago hop that's introducing the major latency, I see a similar jump, 10-12ms through the AT&T network to Chicago and then it jumps to 30+ms once it's handed off to savvis.